Directionless liberal arts majors, I am you. I studied journalism at Bowling Green State University (go Falcons!), giving me such advanced skills as cramming for an exam on libel law and then promptly forgetting all the pertinent details shortly thereafter. I bring this up because I want it clear that I say this with much love – you might want to reconsider that degree in the humanities, the arts or the social sciences, at least if you’re interested in turning those years of specialized training and education into a lucrative career. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce earlier thisyear put out its report Hard Times, breaking down unemployment rates by various majors. And the long of the short of it? The only thing worse than that English degree might be one in architecture.

The fact that people in health care fields might be more in demand than history majors is what we in the journalism biz call a “no duh” proposition. But Hard Times quantifies that issue. According to the report, while the unemployment rate for the recently graduated is 8.9 percent, that rate can vary widely when talking about a recent education graduate (5.4 percent unemployment rate) vs. an arts graduate (11.1 percent). The worst off is architecture, at 13.9 percent – the result, according to the report, of the nation’s moribund real estate market. Within a particular academic field there also can be some notable variation in unemployment rates – for example, 7.3 percent for electrical engineering vs. 8.6 percent for mechanical engineering, or 9.2 percent for liberal arts majors vs. 10.8 percent for philosophy and religious vocations grads.

To be sure, it’s still better to have some kind of advanced training or education than not. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics statistics, the average unemployment rate in 2011 for the holder of an associate’s degree was 6.8 percent, compared with more than 9 percent for people with only a high school diploma. And high school graduates make, on average, only 83 percent of what a person with an associate’s degree does.

So does this mean if your passion is foreign languages, you still should major in math (6.1 percent unemployment rate)? Of course not. Choosing a major just on its career prospects is short sighted given the fact of the career changes that many workers go through. But at the same time, students should be aware of the realities of what they’re getting into. And as a journalism grad who had a devil of a time landing a job back in 1992 in the midst of a recession and has see the industry shrink massively since then, I think colleges need to contemplate whether their academic offerings should be more in line with or scaled to what the workforce demands. When huge numbers of students are leaving college with social science and history degrees at a time when those degrees are less in demand by the world at large, something seems askew.

You’ve been let go from a job. Times are tough, with unemployment rates in western New York just south of 8 percent. So of course you’re going to scour want ads, network your guts out and take every other step you can to land something new. But you don’t need to go to work retraining, at least to legally limit your economic damages. U.S. District Court Judge Charles J. Siragusa, in an ruling last month involving an employment discrimination case against a Buffalo manufacturer, ruled that a fired Dresser Rand machinist did not have to seek retraining for another field even though his former employer argued he would’ve been better off financially if he had.

The case revolves around Harry M. Davis, a Jehovah’s Witness working for Dresser Rand as a machinist. Davis was let go in 2002 at the age of 48 after refusing to work on any “implement of war” and Dresser Rand did substantial work for the Navy. Davis, through the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sued in 2004, claiming religious discrimination. And part of the case today revolves around what kind of damages Davis suffered from losing his Dresser Rand job. After that firing, Davis spent several years working construction and as a machinist at another employer until he was laid off in 2009. Dresser Rand argued that Davis had plenty of opportunities from the moment he was let go to get training to run advanced CNC machinery as many machine shops today use, making future layoffs less likely.

The law holds that victims of employment discrimination have to take reasonable steps to find other work or in some other fashion cut their financial losses. However, Siragusa ruled, those reasonable steps don’t include the requirement that in this case Davis seek out CNC training and ultimately another line of work.

Employers defending themselves in employment discrimination cases are going to look for any clues that the plaintiff didn’t take adequate steps to mitigate their financial losses. But that defense, as law firm Hunton & Williams LLP pointed out in an analysis of the ruling, could get trickier if the canned workers don’t need to do any job retraining.

The Obama administration and Congressional Republicans have worked out the bones of a tax deal that would, among other things, extend the duration of unemployment insurance to 13 months in an attempt to bolster that social safety net for the millions of long-term unemployed. But there are some legitimate questions over whether that’s really a good idea.

The Great Recession has helped shine a magnifying glass on two schools of thought about such benefits, with one camp typically arguing that such spending helps keep families out of the poorhouse and serves as a form of economic stimulus by giving people more spending money in their pocket, and the other arguing that such payments are an incentive not to work (why go get a job when I’m getting this regular check from the government?) and thus have the unintended consequence of making the unemployment rolls bigger than they otherwise would be.

And earlier this summer, ever-controversial Larry Summers – director of the White House National Economic Council – got caught in a wonderful “gotcha!” moment on MSNBC when he had to argue against criticims of unemployment insurance that he made as a Harvard University professor. In that paper, he argued that as well as a disincentive to work, such government assistance motivates people to claim they’re looking for work even when they are not, also boosting the numbers of the unemployed. (In his backpedaling, Summers after the MSNBC moment said that ”whatever small changes in search intensity may be associated with unemployment insurance are not the reason for the persistence of joblessness. With five unemployed Americans seeking work for every job opening available, there can be little doubt that the overwhelming cause of unemployment is not a lack of will among the jobless to find work, but a lack of work opportunities.”)

So do such goverment unemployment benefits result in a larger number of unemployed? Sort of. Research earlier this year by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that extending unemployment benefits has “a relatively modest effect” on raising the unemployment rate. By looking at the unemployment duration for people eligible for unemployment benefits and those who were not, the Fed researchers found that people eligible for benefits were unemployed a little over a week longer than the ineligible. The net result? At the end of 2009, the nation’s unemployment rate likely would’ve been about 9.6 percent instead of 10 percent without the extension of unemployment benefits to a maximum of 99 weeks. Of course, that less than half a percentage point represents 600,000 people – roughly the population of Milwaukee or Nashville. So the question becomes do you accept the price of extended unemployment benefits being carrying the weight of 600,000 who’d stay unemployed forever if benefits went that long, or do you cut off those individuals along with the millions more who presumably are looking for work?

Hopefully the issue is becoming a moot point. While hiring has been at best sluggish in this recovery from the Great Recession, a few pundits have pointed to business uncertainty over tax rates in 2011 as the culprit. Now that the Obama administration and the GOP have the basics of a tax deal worked out, there goes that unceretainty out the window and December and January hiring will be gangbusters. That’s what we were promised by those pundits. So it better come true.

The longest economic downturn in the nation’s post-WW III history began in December 2007 and stretched for 18 months, with the National Bureau of Economic Research determining that the economy started picking up again as of June 2009, albeit slowly. That span saw trillions of dollars of stock market wealth evaporate and milions of Americans lose their jobs. And it picked up its own moniker, the Great Recession.

But there’s a case to be made that it is more akin to a depression, which still is going on even today, said Douglas Hendee, a financial advisor at Brighton Securities.

His point: some of the signifiers of the Great Depression we still have today, just in a different form. Sure, we don’t have long bread lines in soup kitchens. But we have Bill Simon, the CEO of Walmart’s US operations, telling the Goldman Sachs Retail Conference last week that “you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it’s real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when … government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.”

And while the Depression saw unemployment rates of 25 percent (though in some places, like Cleveland Ohio, it hit as high as 60 percent), today if you combine the U3 and U6 numbers of unemployed and underemployed, you’re closing in on 20 percent, Hendee said. (The federal government in the 1930s did not have the U3 and U6 classifications, so an apples-to-apples comparison is not doable. But there’s some indication that U6 underemployment alone in the 1930s was well over 30 percent, leaving today’s numbers in the dust.)

The impact of the Great Recession will likely continue to be felt for years, especially in the form of slow job growth. And the debate over how bad it is now vs. what our grandparents went through 80 years ago becomes somewhat moot if you’re one of the millions of people looking for work to no avail.

As western NY and the nation continues to try to slog out of the Great Recession like Bart and Charlie climbing out of the quicksand in ‘Blazing Saddles,’ some folks have more slogging to do than others.

The nation’s unemployment rate for July was 9.5 percent, meaning roughly 139 million Americans had jobs and 14.6 million did not and were looking (another 84.3 million folks were not in the labor force altogether, up about 3 percent from July 2009).

But that 9.5 percent number hides a lot of variations and dirty laundry. For example, guys have done a bit worse in the recession than the national averages, with a July unemployment rate for adult men of 9.7 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which makes some sense considering the recession has particularly hit such male-dominated fields as construction and manufacturing. The unemployment rate for women was 7.9 percent.

Teen unemployment is particularly high, at 26.1 percent, up nearly 7 percent from July 2009. While teen unemployment rate is always higher than adults, it’s particularly bad during the recession. For much of this decade, the July unemployment rate for teens was in, ahem, the high teens percentage wise. In 2005, for example, it was 16.4 percent.

Among the races, the unemployment rate also sees a wide variety. The white and Asian unemployment rate in July was slightly more than 8 percent, while for black people it was nearly twice that at 15.6 percent and for Hispanics it was 12.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the best argument for staying in school? Not the joy of writing an essay about ’A Tale of Two Cities’ but the fact money speaks louder than Dickens. The July unemployment rate for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher was, on average, 4.5 percent. For a high school graduate with no college it was 10.1 percent. And for someone without even that, the rate goes up to 13.8 percent.

I don’t know much about Kirsten Gillibrand -a lack shared by many New York voters – and I haven’t been able to glean much of her business philosophy from the self-serving press releases she and every politican churn out as if they had some value. But I certainly agree with a statement she made the other day – I believe at the Albany dinner of the legislature’s black and Hispanic caucus – that unemployment, at around 10 percent statewide, is at least 5 points higher in the inner cities. It’s about time politicians begin to demand more specificity – geographic, socioeconomic - about the dimensions of the unemployment problem. To measure Monroe County’s jobless problem using the countywide average of around 9 percent is to downplay the severity of urban poverty and job loss.

You may have noticed that many news wires use the term “Great Recession.” The Associated Press now officially refers to this past (or current?) recession as the Great Recession, a decision which may perturb some economic observers across the nation.

The term gives me pause, and not just because it has political implications which could be used for and against a variety of federal policy proposals. (Democrats may see gain in blaming President Bush for the Great Recession, while Republicans may gain by saying the Great Recession makes it no time for new taxes or heavy spending.)

It is and will be debatable that the Great Recession, which probably lasted from December 2007 to the summer of 2009, was worse than the double-dip recessions of 1980 and 1982, or the lengthy 1973-1975 recession.

Unemployment, which is 9.7 percent now, was certainly as high in 1975: It hit 9 percent in May 1975. It was higher in the 1982 recession. It hit 10.8 percent in November and December of 1982. Thus, the term “Great Recession” was kicked around following the recessions in 1982 and even 2001, according to Catherine Rampell of the New York Times. The term never stuck. Using the term now may be premature.

Yet unemployment is one metric. The political and economic drama has been so intense, I think the term may stick well past 2010. Why? Well, the nation endured subprime-loan follies, followed by the traumatic Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, followed by a small panic and then TARP, followed by GM and Chrysler bankruptcies. These are only the major chapters of the book. That is hard to top.

The recession has not been officially declared at an end by the team that matters the most, the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Cambridge, Mass.-based economics board — which does not use the term depression, by the way – judges business cycles. It declared a recession, or a downturn in a business cycle, had started in December 2007. Some regional economists, including Gary Keith of M&T Bank, believe the recession probably ended in the summer of 2009.

Regardless of a possible recovery, the pain the nation endured and endures seems Great Depression-like. And then there is the future: Unemployment could lag well behind the recovery we are probably in. Unemployment numbers are still setting records, including the length that the jobless suffer. And some economists warn that the U.S. gross domestic product could return to red-ink territory, where it hasn’t been since about June 2009.

So get used to hearing the term “Great Recession.” If nothing else, it sums up the dread we still feel.

That’s what Schumer said at McAlpin Industries in Rochester on Monday, as he toured the sheet-metal plant and promoted a proposed, bipartisan payroll-tax cut.

When I questioned him about the Democrats’ laser-like focus on health care reform in 2009 — as unemployment rocketed up — Schumer did not dither, taking the candid approach.

Schumer said the recent Massachusetts election, which saw Democrat Ted Kennedy’s former U.S. Senate seat won by Republican Scott Brown, was a wake-up call to all officeholders. He said the message was clear: Focus on jobs, the economy and the middle class.

He did not rule out other agenda items, of course, but Schumer seems keenly aware of the pain the 9 percent unemployment rate in New York is causing, and the problems it could cause political incumbents in November elections.

Diana Louise Carter was born at Rochester General Hospital the same year it opened and reared in Bristol, Ontario County. After college and grad school, her first reporting job was on a small newspaper in Western Massachusetts. She returned to Rochester in late 1987 to work for the Democrat and Chronicle. Carter covers agriculture and banking. She lives in the Upper Monroe neighborhood of Rochester with her husband and three children.

Matthew Daneman is a business reporter with the Democrat and Chronicle, covering imaging, optics, printing, telecommunications, manufacturing and a host of other topics. He lives in Rochester with his wife, Sheila. If he could have authentic western N.Y. chicken wings morning, noon and night, he would.

Tom Tobin has 30 years experience with Gannett newspapers as an editor and reporter. He lives in Rochester and has two children: Lia, 16, and Melissa, 11.